Firstly, "it's current year" is never a good argument, but you seem to be confusing things (UTF-8 vs Unicode). UTF-8 can take as much as 6 bytes to encode a Uni

Firstly, "it's current year" is never a good argument, but you seem to be confusing things (UTF-8 vs Unicode). UTF-8 can take as much as 6 bytes to encode a Unicode codepoint. If you want to store UUIDs as compactly as possible you'd use 16 bytes. If you want to store them as text, mapping them to Unicode would be a terrible idea because: many characters are from scripts you've never heard of, many characters look identical (Α vs A), many characters are decomposed and it can change the encoding if they're decomposed[1], &c. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precomposed_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precomposed_character